Saturday, April 13, 2013

Vermont is building a universal health care system

This is the power of states rights, where Vermont is making itself a Guinea pig for the rest of the nation to show what happens in an American universal health care system.

Similar experiments in Maine and Massachusetts failed to live up to expectations, and I imagine Vermont will as well.

While I think it will fail, I don't think it will fail much more than the rest of the nation. We have an over-regulated government control system with some of the trappings of markets, but no real market forces. Our system is so terrible it's possible a bad health care system run exclusively by the government would be an improvement.

I don't think Vermont is making a wise choice, but when they fail I will end up with another example to use. What we need to do now is record the specific goals and predictions of supporters to prevent them from finding a silver lining and saying they system worked based on new criteria, such as if the number of people covered increases or rates of disease X fall while costs spiral out of control.
Now if we can only get New Hampshire to try a deregulated market-based system so we have something to compare to.